Weekend Reading: WordPress 3.8, Security Holes + Google Glass

by Jason Unger, Founder

Insights / Website Development / Weekend Reading: WordPress 3.8, Security Holes + Google Glass

As we count down the days and weeks until the end of 2014, we’re getting closer to wrapping up an amazing year. It’s been a great year to be working with WordPress, as the software has continued to grow and develop into a product that solves any digital problem and can host any type of web site.

For this edition of Weekend Reading, we’re focusing on WordPress – especially since they just released a big update, version 3.8. Digital Ink clients will get updated to it in the next few days, as we take it for a test run and make sure there’ll be nothing but good things about upgrading your sites.

WordPress 3.8 arrives with redesigned dashboard, new theme and widget screens, vector-based icons, and more

Dubbed “Parker” in honor of American jazz saxophonist and composer Charlie Parker, WordPress 3.8 brings a new look to the entire admin dashboard.

The new features are as follows:

• • • Modern aesthetic: The new WordPress dashboard has a fresh, uncluttered design that embraces clarity and simplicity.
    • Clean typography: The Open Sans typeface provides simple, friendly text that is optimized for both desktop and mobile viewing. It’s even open source, just like WordPress.
    • Refined contrast: With superior contrast and large, comfortable type, the new design is easy to read and a pleasure to navigate.
    • High definition at high speed: WordPress is sharper than ever with new vector-based icons that scale to your screen. By ditching pixels, pages load significantly faster, too.
    • Admin color schemes: WordPress now includes eight new admin color schemes, which can be previewed and changed from your Profile page.
    • Refined theme management: The new themes screen lets you survey your themes at a glance. Click to add more information, and use your keyboard’s navigation arrows to flip through themes.
    • Smoother widget experience: The widgets screen has been streamlined. On large monitors, multiple widget areas stack side-by-side to use the available space while on tablets, just tap a widget to add it.
    • Twenty Fourteen: Turn your blog into a magazine with this new theme. Choose a grid or a slider to display featured content on your homepage. Customize your site with three widget areas or change your layout with two page templates.

WordPress bloggers can now post photos, videos using Google Glass

Integrated into the popular blogging software using a new plugin developed by Weber Shandwick, bloggers that utilize the self-hosted version of WordPress can now use Google Glass to post media directly to their blog. Potentially ideal for live events, the wpForGlass plugin will post both photos and video to the blog.

Canadian ISP learns folly of unpatched WordPress sites

Ottawa-based Storm Internet learned a valuable lesson in keeping software up to date – especially when its the content management system behind your website, report malware researchers at Blue Coat.

Without knowing it, the Internet service provider was hosting thousands of malware pages peddling the familiar Canadian Pharmacy spam along with a lot of other malware and junk you generally don’t want on your servers. The Blue Coat team noticed the malicious activity on the site and linked it back to an intrusion on Nov. 27 to Storm’s site caused by a malicious PHP file that was uploaded into the WordPress uploads directly via a vulnerability in the “wp_mailinglist” plugin. After that foothold was gained, hackers found their way into the main WordPress directory and started generating malware pages as needed.